After years of riot-inducing wretchedness,
renewal makes its way to Tampa

By Anika Myers Palm

TAMPA, Fla. – Belmont Heights was never pretty.

Situated near downtown Tampa, Belmont Heights was home for decades to the trash-strewn College Hill Homes and Ponce de Leon housing projects, a collection of functional but nondescript, gray-and-beige cinderblock buildings once synonymous with the city’s drug trade – and worse.

The neighborhood doesn’t look that way today. The projects are long gone. But almost as Central Park Village did in 1967, in the 1980s, Belmont Heights made its presence known in a big way.

It was in College Hill, the worst of its two neighborhoods, where Tampa’s second major riot occurred. On Feb. 20, 1987, blacks threw rocks, set fires and fired guns for three nights after Melvin Eugene Hair, a black man diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, died after a white police officer locked him in a choke hold. The disturbance intensified after police were cleared of wrongdoing in the arrest of baseball star Dwight Gooden.

According to The Tampa Tribune Gooden, a Belmont Heights native, had been pulled over by 22 police officers on suspicion of DUI. His bruise-filled face incited more anger.

Two years later, College Hill also was the site of another uprising. That one happened after suspected drug dealer Edgar Allen Price died in police custody on Feb. 1, 1989.

For the next two nights blacks threw bricks and bottles, mainly because they believed police had beaten Price to death. An investigation revealed that Price died of asphyxiation after police officers cuffed him and placed him face down in the cruiser. The officers were cleared of wrongdoing.

But that once-troubled area has buried its volatile profile along with its dilapidated projects.

In the place where the Ponce de Leon projects and College Hill once stood is Belmont Heights Estates, a mixed-income walkable community where brightly colored townhouses and single-family homes coexist with businesses and a new library.

The city received $32.5 million in federal funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the Hope VI program to renovate the nation’s worst housing projects and change them into mixed-income developments, according to Lillian Stringer, a spokesperson for the Tampa Housing Authority.

“It was a major change for that area,” she said. In addition to the town homes and single-family houses, Belmont Heights now has a village for elderly residents and traditional public housing, totaling 860 units.

The revamp has helped.

A 2006 University of South Florida study showed major crimes had fallen nearly 50 percent in Belmont Heights Estates the first year after the community’s revitalization – a significant improvement for an area once considered too dangerous a place to go after dark.

Yet with all the changes, students from Belmont Heights Estates still live in one of the most segregated communities in Tampa and attend some of Hillsborough County’s most troubled schools.

And not everyone has benefited from the improvements to the neighborhood: Some of the people who once called Belmont Heights home have been dispersed elsewhere.

BLACK TAMPA SINCE KERNER

Belmont Heights Estates is just one primarily black neighborhood, but its ups and downs are indicative of just how Tampa’s black community has changed in the years since the June 1967 riot – and since the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, or the Kerner Commission, shocked America with its declaration that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

While the steepest barriers to equality, such as laws that allow housing communities to discriminate based on race, have been torn down, structural and economic challenges – some of which have been made worse by the disappearance of much of the social network that once bound the city’s black residents to each other – still remain.

A century ago, the area that became Belmont Heights Estates provided that network for Tampa’s blacks. It wasn’t just that people wanted to live there; it was almost the only place blacks could rent homes – or buy property – near Tampa, according to archives at University of South Florida, which feature interviews with some of the city’s earliest members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Not far away, along Central Avenue, black Tampa’s real commercial core developed as restaurants and small businesses serving the city’s black community sprang up and thrived.

In the wake of the 1967 riot – which, like the disturbances in 1987 and 1989 erupted after a black man died at the hands of police – and the city’s determination to make sure such events never happened again, Tampa embarked on what would become a 40-year multi-pronged project to avoid the commission’s two societies prediction. So did the city succeed?

In some ways it did – and in some ways it didn’t.

MORE EQUAL, BUT STILL SEPARATE

Black residents now have access to jobs that were out of their reach in 1968, and several have been elected or appointed to several citywide positions, including city clerk, city council and police chief.

And statistics show that while the vast majority of Tampa’s blacks no longer live in substandard housing, as they did prior to Kerner (the commission found that six out of 10 houses where blacks lived were unsound) most continue to live in predominantly-black communities.

Of the 322,888 people who live in its city limits, about 64 percent are white, 26 are percent black, 19 percent are Hispanic, 3 percent are “other,” and 2 percent are Asian, according to city data.

But Belmont Heights remains 73 percent black, and about 21 percent white. West Tampa, considered a middle-class neighborhood, is about 74 percent white, 11 percent black and 51 percent Hispanic, while Ybor City is about 72 percent black, 20 percent white and 20 percent Hispanic.

The Seminole Heights area is one of the few neighborhoods within Tampa city limits where the population of blacks and whites are nearly equal. That neighborhood is nearly 50 percent white, about 43 percent black, just less than 4 percent “other” and about 13 percent Hispanic, according to city data.

Researchers are unsure as to whether blacks and other races and ethnicities choose to live among themselves, or if there are other reasons for that, according to Robert Adelman, assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University.

But many signs indicate that at least in Tampa, for many blacks, living in a certain neighborhood no longer equates to being trapped there.

MOVING UP AND OUT

While the majority of the city’s blacks still live in largely segregated neighborhoods, those with the means to do so took advantage of the changing times to move into larger homes in safer neighborhoods and near better schools.

But when wealthy blacks, followed by educated professionals and finally working-class residents, moved away from older black neighborhoods and loosened their ties, it resulted in a brain drain for those places.

As a result, it is harder for companies and groups that target traditionally black communities to reach as many blacks as they once did – now that they’re no longer as concentrated as before.

“We market a lot of our services through the [black-owned newspaper] Florida Sentinel, and on [black-interest radio station] WTMP – they do newsy talk shows,” said Toni Watts, CEO of the Corporation to Develop Communities of Tampa, an economicdevelopment group. “You do have to do what you can to get the word out.”

Then again, some of the blacks who left the neighborhoods where they grew up didn’t move that far away.

West Tampa, in particular, became a popular destination for the city’s middle-class blacks. The sprawling, poorly defined area near the football stadium for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, also was home to significant numbers of blacks and Latinos.

THE RENEWAL BEGINS

Projects to revitalize Tampa neighborhoods dominated by blacks and Latinos began in the 1970s. But city officials really became serious about making changes in the 1980s, when they started to contemplate what it would take to bring an Olympic Games to the city.

The newest targets include Central Park Village, a 400-unit housing project near downtown Tampa, and East Tampa.

City government development literature describes East Tampa, which includes Belmont Heights, as Tampa’s “unpolished gem.” The city hopes to do for the area what it did for Ybor City, an area near downtown Tampa with a large black and Hispanic population.

Ybor City, sometimes known as Tampa’s Bourbon Street, was named a Community Redevelopment Area in 1988 as city officials decided to focus on eliminating blight in its most historic community.

The redevelopment plan centered on stimulating Ybor City’s business community, primarily by the use of incentives, which included ad valorem tax exemptions, loans and tax credits for historic preservation. Other incentives are designed to encourage companies offering jobs with high salaries to come to Ybor City.

Seminole Heights, another in-town neighborhood with a history of crime, began to make the changes without city help – mostly by gentrification beginning in the late 1980s.

That neighborhood – once home to street after street of Craftsman-style houses in disrepair – now is the home of a neighborhood association that says its mission is to ensure continued gentrification. It also maintains committees on standards for land use and preserving the neighborhood’s greenways.

Also, even as their neighborhoods are largely segregated, there’s some indication that Tampa’s black communities are not entirely isolated economically. The funds for redevelopment of some of these areas come from the state’s tourism-tax-fattened coffers.

But if those dollars decline, less money will be available for community redevelopment and other issues of concern to blacks.

DESEGREGATION’S DOWNSIDE

That’s why some members of Tampa’s black community are moving full-speed ahead with efforts to encourage residents to consider starting their own businesses.

But the effort has been stymied by the difficulty in finding ways to reach both the blacks who live in all-black communities and those who no longer live in those neighborhoods – and have few connections to them.

“If I can get the [black] bar association, the medical group, the dental group and these other groups to the table, we might all know a bit better what’s going on,” said Villard Houston, founder of the Urban Florida League of Business, a Tampa-based chamber of commerce affiliated with the Florida Black Chamber of Commerce.

Even with grassroots and city commitments to encouraging black entrepreneurship and redeveloping communities where Tampa’s blacks live, some members of Tampa’s black community miss what they once had.

Many fondly remember Central Avenue, once the heart of Tampa’s black community, a street that buzzed with black-owned businesses, nightclubs and restaurants.

Although revitalized in some sections, the street’s commercial activity, decimated by the interstate that divided the community, is a shadow of its former self today.

“In the ‘50s and ‘60s, when we had our own black business district, it was a great time for this community,” state Rep. Arthenia Joyner, a Tampa Democrat, told The Tampa Tribune in 2005.

“Lawyers, newspapermen, barbers, bar owners, doctors. Everything we needed was there. …Those were segregated times, but they were wonderful times,” she said.

EDUCATION’S MIXED BAG SINCE KERNER

Times weren’t so wonderful, however, for most black youths who were trying to get an education in Tampa. In the 1960s, the education system for blacks was as broken as the housing.

According to the Kerner Commission report, most black youths rarely reached the eighth grade. Of those blacks who made it to their senior year, only 3 to 4 percent of them scored the minimum passing score on the state college entrance examination.

As a result of a 1971 desegregation order, which many hoped would boost black achievement, Hillsborough County Public Schools also had changed George S. Middleton and Howard W. Blake, once-proud all-black high schools, to middle schools. It was a particular blow to those in Tampa’s black community who had attended those high schools for generations.

And while graduation rates have improved, some of the statistics remain alarming.

While 90 percent of Hillsborough County’s white 10th graders and 73 percent of Hispanic 10th graders earned passing mathematics scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in 2007, only 60 percent of the county’s black 10th graders did.

Likewise, only 33 percent of black 10th graders earned passing FCAT reading scores in 2007, while 44 percent of Hispanics and 70 percent of the county’s white 10th graders did, according to state education data.

That’s why some black Tampans mounted a grassroots effort beginning in the early 1990s to return the former high-schools to full high-school status – with the hope that intensive focus in their own neighborhoods would contribute to higher test scores for black students.

The group, which comprised Blake alumni and others, had collected 456 signatures and began to discuss the possibility of reestablishing Blake and Middleton Middle School as high schools. They began with Blake. But to their dismay, they discovered that the school board had different ideas about what the new high school should be.

The school board sought to make Blake a magnet school for high-achieving students, but the alumni group wanted the new facility to operate as a standard neighborhood high school, so it would serve nearby black students instead of white students from the suburbs.

For the Blake and Middleton alumni group, magnet programs weren’t an option.

“Magnet school is another way of saying freedom of choice. Without an involuntary satellite where students are required to attend, magnet schools will become segregated,” then-Tampa Urban League president Joanna Tokley told the Florida Sentinel Bulletin in 1999. “The plan is a Trojan horse.”

The group also was upset at the school board’s plan to locate the new Blake High School in a neighborhood that was considered by Tampans to be closer to downtown than the city’s black community. Several editorials in the Florida Sentinel Bulletin argued that the new school should be placed in the heart of Tampa’s black community.

Yet Blake activists ultimately accepted the school board’s wish for a magnet program.

In 1997, Blake High School opened in West Tampa with both a traditional “liberal arts” curriculum and a magnet program for the performing arts. The new Middleton High School, with a special magnet science program, followed in 2002.

Today, Blake is about 50 percent black, about 25 percent white, about 19 percent Hispanic and about 5 percent other.

Middleton is about 72 percent black, about 14 percent white, about 11 percent Hispanic and about 3 percent other.

But even though the Blake activists were forced to compromise on the mission of the formerly all-black schools, their success at putting them on the public agenda illustrates both the growth and the limitations of black political power in Tampa – so much so that it no longer resembles the troubled place described in the Kerner Commission report.

Some other blacks may be noticing that.

The Miami Herald reported in fall 2007 that about 30 percent of blacks who live in Miami-Dade County and earn between $60,000 and $80,000 annually wanted to move from the county as soon as possible.

Among their top three choices for a new location? Tampa.